The other day before running errands, I apparently waited a little too long after the garage door opened before putting the car in gear, causing Mom to ask, "What are you thinking?" My honest answer: "I'm trying to remember the full chorus of 'Breakout' by Swing Out Sister." Mom had no follow-up questions.

Breakout

Don't stop to ask. And now you've found a break to make at last. You've got to find a way. Say what you want to say. Breakout.

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Great news! I may have finally killed my "The Way" brain worm (details here) with the following song which I have listened to over and over and over again for the past three days, not because I have to but because I want to. (Is it still a compulsion if you enjoy it?)

Whiskey Peak Saloon featuring Leo P by Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli

Lucky for you, if you don't want to listen on YouTube, Netflix has you covered with links to plenty of other platforms here: netflixmusic.ffm.to/whiskypeaksaloon.

TURN UP YOUR SPEAKERS AND BOOGIE.

(And before you ask, yes, I have watched both seasons of the Netflix live-action One Piece series. I enjoyed them a quite a lot.)

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One week ago today, while stuck in typical Saturday afternoon traffic on the Connector in Atlanta, I listened to the 1998 pop song "The Way" by Fastball. That has proven to be a terrible, terrible mistake. No matter what I've tried, I have not been able to get that song out of my head.

On Sunday, I enjoyed it; it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it. By Monday, it was annoying. Tuesday, I was starting to think I had a real problem. Wednesday, I watched the music video about a half dozen times in a row in an attempt to burn it out, and for the rest of the evening, I thought I had it licked. But the very first thing I did on Thursday as I pulled myself out of bed was start reciting the lyrics again. In the car Friday, every time I let my attention wander, I caught myself humming it.

Is this madness? Could the sequence of notes in the song have triggered something in my brain, like a sonic virus? Can you sing someone into insanity? They say music is like mathematics, right? Do I suddenly have A Beautiful Mind? What kind of doctor do you see for ear worms? Damn you, Fastball!

Because I refuse to suffer alone, I'm embedding it here:

youtu.be/X5jlTlUTWfQ

You will listen. Whether you know it yet or not, there is only The Way.

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Flower

I first heard of Phair in 1993 in the Mazda Miata with Mom during the afternoon rush hour commute between Emory University and Newnan when Phair's debut Exile in Guyville album was reviewed on NPR.

Thanks to the Internet, I can tell you that day must have been Tuesday, July 20,¹ when Ken Tucker reviewed Exile in Guyville, released in June 1993, for Terry Gross's Fresh Air. That was the summer before my freshman year at Emory, so what was I doing in the car? Was I working part-time in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases office with Mom before my work-study position started in August, or was I just killing time driving the convertible around downtown Atlanta while Mom was working? Could have been either.)

The Internet also makes it possible for me to transcribe Tucker's praise for this song in particular:

There's a thin quality to Exile in Guyville. It ends up making you think that Liz Phair is something of a dabbler, that If this rock thing doesn't work out, she'll take up painting or maybe just use her trust fund to live in Paris for a while. But there's a core of about four or five songs here that are really first rate, and one in particular, called "Flower," that I can't play on the radio but which is as fine and bold a song as I've heard about sexual obsession.

Obviously, I had to have any album with that kind of recommendation. I probably bought the cassette at the Tower Records behind Lennox Mall, and I recall playing it quite a bit during the long commutes between Atlanta and Newnan. Listening to Phair always made me feel rebellious and cool, as good rock music should. "I'll take you home and make you like it," indeed.

Thanks, Internet!

¹ The Internet tells me July 20, 1993², was the same day that the press box caught on fire at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, which 90s Atlanta Braves fans will recall as the day that Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff made his debut for the team, in his third at-bat hitting a home run to drive in Ron Gant to tie the game at 5-5 in the 6th inning. The fire didn't start until 6, so I think we found out about the fire after we got home. The fire delayed the game start until after 9; I might have watched it, but I don't have any memory of that.

² You know what else happened on July 20, 1993? Some guy named Vince Foster committed suicide. And no one ever uttered his name again.

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Look, I love Benson Boone's "Mystical Magical" as much as the next guy, but after hearing it in every commercial break since ESPN's coverage of the U.S. Open used it for intro and outro bumpers in August through this week's NFL coverage, maybe there is such a thing as overexposure.

I'm not alone in thinking that. There is, Google assure me, a pretty sizable backlash to the rapid, overt commercialization of Mr. Boone's music. Selling out is fine in America; greed, not so much. The singer and his team are aware of this, and his music video for "Mr. Electric Blue" makes a good-natured joke of it by removing any hint of the hypocrisy that pollutes the modern zeitgeist. (Yes, despite being an old fogey who doesn't really care for music, I do watch music videos on YouTube as the Internet Gods intended. The old-school media's widely reported recent death of Music Television has been greatly exaggerated; music videos are not dead, linear television is.)

It's kind of a funny thing to say that you could hear any piece of music "too much." Despite the tendency of human beings (at least American human being) to resent the familiar, there are a bunch of songs I just never get tired of hearing. Back in the day when I was a waiter at Chili's, the chain played tapes of licensed music over and over until the entire wait staff would gather around the back office cassette player and argue over which tapes management was NOT allowed to play again that day. (No tapes were ever destroyed, but some were occasionally hidden. I hope they still haven't been found.) Despite the repetition, there was one song on those tapes that I could never get sick of. I bet you'd never guess that it was "Silly Love Songs" by Wings. Live and let die, indeed.

Several Paul McCartney songs, both with and without co-writer John Lennon, are high on my list of endless listening, which probably demonstrates that I have a high tolerance for what McCartney is interested in writing: the poppiest of pop music. Fizzy, friendly, sugary pop music. Overproduced sounds that have a good beat and you can dance to, lyrics that really shouldn't be thought about too hard. That's my jam. Music crafted to please the widest possible music-illiterate crowd, "Moonbeam ice cream" sort of stuff, like Dua Lipa, Katie Perry, Madonna, Michael Jackson, or, say, Olivia Newton John.

And please crowds they do. Why else would Madison Avenue adapt catchy tunes for advertising in Apple product ads or the memorable '90s Philips campaign that used the Beatles "Getting Better" (somehow always fading out just before the "it can't get no worse" refrain) or this year's sanitized-for-Christmas "Greased Lightnin'" (with zero creaming girls) or Target's 2025 commercials of their animated Get-Ready Yeti dancing to "Mystical Magical."

Okay, fine. I'm not sick of moonbeam ice cream just yet. 'Cause once you know, once you know...

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I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but the coming year has got to be better than the last, right?

The legacy of 2025 will be that of a time of transition. I have lived through the coming of cable television and the Internet and social media and smart phones and now AI and the loss of newspapers. More than ever, it feels like the billionaire-run corporations own us, body and soul. It certainly doesn't help that the elected head of our government, the man who is supposed to be a champion of the people, is shattering every cultural and economic norm he can reach.

Take heart that there are a lot of us feeling fed up right now. And, as always, the voices of history can provide some guidance in these troubling times:

Someday, somebody's gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye. Until then, baby, are you going to let 'em hold you down and make you cry? Don't you know? Don't you know, things can change? Things will go your way if you hold on for one more day.

Can you hold on?

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Since I've already made such a big deal about how "Spider-Man" is one word...

Spiderman

You might notice there's no hyphen in that title. That's how they spelled it when the song was included in the 2005 box set Weird Tales of the Ramones, which for all I know is how it was spelled in 1995 when it was released as an unlisted bonus track on the Ramones final studio album, ¡Adios Amigos! CD, which I bought just for that secret track. A slightly different version of the song, also by the Ramones but spelled with the Marvel Comics approved hyphen, is on Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, also from 1995, which I have never owned because most of its covers of classic cartoon themes are not improvements over the originals. Not every band can be the Ramones.

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Recent circumstances conspired to take away my TCM but grant me a month of Netflix access. So, at the recommendation of Friend Ken, I started at the top:

104/2536. KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
If you wondered why Google reported that 6 of the top 10 Halloween costumes for 2025 were characters from this movie, the answer is simple: it's good. Very good. So good, in fact, I cannot believe that Sony and Netflix didn't negotiate a more traditional box office release. The creators learned all the right lessons from George Lucas's usual box of tricks, taking inspiration from a bunch of long pre-existing concepts and designs, blending them into a story of good versus evil in a lived-in world, and pouring the results into a time-tested, character-first dramatic format that is comfortable and rewarding to viewers. For extra Star Wars vibes: like Fox in '77, Netflix seemed totally unprepared for the flood of demands for kids' merchandise. History may not repeat itself, but it sure as hell stutters.

As amazing as John Williams is, what Star Wars does not have is pop songs. It's no accident that the Kpop soundtrack has had a very catchy (and plot advancing) song from the fictional Huntr/x at the top of the Billboard global charts for 15 weeks and counting. A song, I'll point out, that has a one-word title:

Golden

Kudos to all involved; I hope you like printing money. (Count me in for a Derpy Tiger Funko Pop! figure, if ya'll can ever actually get them to market.)

More to come.

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Super Heroes

Sure, technically the song title on the musical and movie soundtrack are two words, but Rocky Horror is British. Here in America, home of Superman and Spider-Man, we spell it as one word (sometimes, at Spider-Man's insistence, with a hyphen). So I'm counting the song as a one-word wonder.

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One

Also: The number of wins the Miami Dolphins have earned in the 2025 season so far.

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